Jerome : (Verse 43, 44.) And you shall remember ((Vulgate: interserit ibi)) your ways, and all your sins, with which you have defiled yourselves in them: and you shall be displeased with yourselves in your own sight for all the evils that you have done, and you shall know that I am the Lord, when I will have done good to you for the sake of my name: not according to your evil ways, and your wicked deeds, O house of Israel, says the Lord God. We cannot remember our sins and vices unless we have been brought into the land of Israel, and there we may say with the Apostle: "I am not worthy to be called an Apostle, because I persecuted the Church of God" (I Corinthians 15:9). And you will displease, he says, yourselves in your own sight in all your wickedness that you have done. Whether, as Symmachus interpreted, And you little ones will seem small to yourselves because of all the wickedness that you have done (James IV). So that, after they have been exalted, they may believe themselves to be humble: because the Lord gives grace to the humble. And in another place it is written: Before contrition, the heart of a man is exalted, and before exaltation it is humbled (Prov. XVIII, 12). For pride, there is destruction, and from humility comes exaltation. And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I have done good to you. And we know the Lord our Savior more when He has done good to us, and has suffered for our sins, and has borne our iniquities, and has grieved for us; not for any merit of those who are saved, but for the sake of His name. Otherwise, our ways and our most wicked crimes have not earned mercy, but punishment. But whatever we have said about the people of Israel, who were freed from Egypt and committed many sins in the wilderness, and offended God, and later were led into the promised land, worshipped idols, wood and stones, and afterward were preserved by the mercy of God: let us recount to those who, by the hand of the Lord, were freed from Egypt of this age, brought into the wilderness of vice, and once again longed for Egypt, and did the things for which they deserved to be punished; yet nevertheless, through repentance, they were preserved not by their own merit, but by the mercy of the Lord. — Commentary on Ezekiel John Cassian : We are thus taught by the words of the Lord himself: everything is granted to us by God, and that the whole of our salvation is to be ascribed not to the merit of our own works but to heavenly grace. — CONFERENCE 13:18